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Books by Brent Ryan Bellamy

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass species extinction, and other ongoing p... more As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass species extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of policy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like?

Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.

From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, policymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.

As author Kim Stanley Robinson writes in his foreword, "So many new words gathered together like this, each bringing with it a new concept and system, creates a dizzying effect. This is good and right, because we live in a dizzying time. What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge—lots of them. So this book’s profusion is an accurate foretelling of what will come. It’s a kind of science fiction story in the form of a lexicon, and it postulates and helps to create a future culture more articulate and wiser than we are now. Thus by definition it is a utopian science fiction story."

Language can only take us so far, of course. To add an additional imaginative layer, we challenged fourteen artists from eleven countries to respond to selected entries with original artwork, which is included in full color in the book. The result is a transmedia conversation between the originary author, culture, or subculture; a critical thinker; and an artist.

See more info at www.ecotopianlexicon.com, and buy the book at https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/an-ecotopian-lexicon.

by Cymene Howe, Janet Stewart, Brent Ryan Bellamy, ian Clarke, Jeff Diamanti, Rachel Havrelock, Olivia Heaney, Bob Johnson, Negar Mottahedeh, Carolyn Veldstra, and Caleb Wellum

A multi-authored project embedded in "After Oil: Explorations and Experiments in the Future of En... more A multi-authored project embedded in "After Oil: Explorations and Experiments in the Future of Energy, Culture and Society"
[my small contribution is under Energy Futures, Infrastructures, "Gridlife Dependencies"]

A collective project of the Petrocultures Research Group. My contribution is under "The Arts, Hum... more A collective project of the Petrocultures Research Group. My contribution is under "The Arts, Humanities, and Energy
(or, What Can Art tell us about Oil?)."

Materialism and the Critique of Energy , 2018

PDF available: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy Materialism and the Critique o... more PDF available: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy

Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.

Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities.

After Oil is the product of a collaborative, interdisciplinary research partnership designed to e... more After Oil is the product of a collaborative, interdisciplinary research partnership designed to explore, critically and creatively, the social, cultural and political changes necessary to facilitate a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. The energy forms in any one era fundamentally shape the attributes and capabilities of societies in that era.

by Imre Szeman, Ruth Beer, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Dominic Boyer, Jeff Diamanti, Rachel Havrelock, Cymene Howe, Bob Johnson, Jordan Kinder, Tihamer Richard Kover, Graeme Macdonald, Carolyn Veldstra, Caleb Wellum, and Sheena Wilson

West Virginia University Press, 2016

After Oil explores the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-sca... more After Oil explores the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains why the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources is only the first step of energy transition.

by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Darin Barney, Dr., Ruth Beer, Dominic Boyer, Olivia Heaney, Cymene Howe, David Kahane, Jerilyn Sambrooke, Aaron Veldstra, Carolyn Veldstra, Caleb Wellum, and Saulesh Yessenova

One of the many things that make this short document distinctive is that it is a collective docum... more One of the many things that make this short document distinctive is that it is a collective document, the product of intensive work by thinkers committed to addressing the difficult questions we will need to pose—and answer—if we are to ever get to a world after oil. It is this kind of collective work that will be needed over the coming years and decades to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and from a petroculture to the new global culture that we can see just over the horizon.

Articles by Brent Ryan Bellamy

An Ecotopian Lexicon, 2019

The introduction to An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bel... more The introduction to An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). PDF includes the Introduction, Table of Contents, and Kim Stanley Robinson's foreword.

As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of policy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like?

From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that challenges and expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, policymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.

Science Fiction Studies, 2018

The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven developme... more The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven development from Earth to the solar system, making the human reality of life lived in space a central concern. The Expanse envisions a colonized solar system, replete with a United-Nations-controlled Terra and Luna, a military dictatorship on Mars, and a densely populated asteroid belt. This essay proposes that The Expanse offers an image of a worlds-system, by which we mean an interplanetary system of capital accumulation that reproduces the structure of twentieth-century geopolitical economy at the level of the solar system. At one and the same time, The Expanse imagines a new cycle of accumulation founded in the planetary system and premised on ecological crisis on Earth and it provides a re-narration of the end of the cycle of accumulation that has been called the long twentieth century or the American century, which exasperated the climate crisis in the first instance. The Expanse is a pivotal narrative that promises a new interplanetary cycle of accumulation and its decline all at once, a fantasy of continuity that simultaneously dramatizes the contemporary crisis of futurity.

Open Library of Humanities, Sep 13, 2019

This paper develops a take on the cultural moment of the long energy crisis (1973–1992) through t... more This paper develops a take on the cultural moment of the long energy crisis (1973–1992) through two popular science-fiction texts. It divides the period in two: ‘oil shock’ and ‘oil glut’. Further periodizing Fredric Jameson’s intervention into the discussion of postmodernism and his successive naming of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capital within this framework of crisis, I ask what might be said about postmodernism in light of this moment of fossil-fuelled turmoil in the global system. My essay has two poles each located in a text from the period: Isaac Asimov’s essay ‘The Nightmare Life without Fuel’ (1983) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). From oil shock to oil glut, this paper uses Patricia Yaeger’s and Graeme Macdonald’s work on the concept of an energy unconscious in order to begin elaborating the cultural logical of late fossil capital.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Triptych extrapolates three different futures from the p... more Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Triptych extrapolates three different futures from the present of the 1980s: blasted cities, tangled highways, and enlightened communes take shape in each story world. These novels—The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990)—unfold a chronology of fictional future events within the bounded cultural geography of Orange County. Robinson routes the Three Californias Triptych in parallel rather than in series, which does not prevent the generation of meaning across texts. A difference between a triptych and a trilogy is that the meaning gets fixed not in the bildung of character, but in the difference between these extrapolations of Orange County. Though each novel depicts a wildly different future for Orange County, all three are, tellingly, petrofutures, meaning that the social relations that allowed fossil capital to thrive still hold remarkable sway precisely in connection to the long afterlife of the built world of oil. In this way, they play off of an actually existing California caught in the full grip of fossil-fuel reliance.

On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta... more On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and neighbouring municipalities swelled with the 90,000 residents forced to flee their homes, Postmedia News (Canada’s go-to media source for neo-liberal spin) ventured to lift the collective mood with a type of silver-lining headline: “Good news everyone! Wildfires deemed no threat to Fort McMurray radioactive waste site” (Graney). Good news indeed, although perhaps compromised in its goodness by some unsettling details in the accompanying story: for instance, that the waste site now deemed safe from fire holds 43,500 cubic metres of uranium ore residue and contaminated topsoil; or that the tomb of this waste, housed beneath the city’s centrally-located Beacon Hill neighborhood, is effectively in midtown; or that the construction of the site in 2003 served to contain spillage occurring all the way back in the 1940s and 50s, a fact and a timeline meaning that the atmosphere within which Fort McMurray grew exponentially in the second half of the twentieth century was literally one of unaddressed radioactive contamination. In this regard, one might read the exclamation mark in Postmedia’s headline as doubly punctual, driving home the affect requisite to the story itself while also demarcating sharply the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of radioactivity. Never mind the uncertainties of the radioactive past, the headline’s exclamation seems to say: trust instead in the security—the inviolability—of our collective radioactive future.1
That the “good news” on offer in this story was genuinely news will not only index popular ignorance about the storage of radioactive waste in Fort McMurray—it will also prove symptomatic of profound historical amnesia: the widespread forgetting or indeed failure to know that this northern city, well before becoming a global centre for bitumen extraction, was once a key hub in the transport of uranium. The radioactive materials were sourced in the 1940s from the world’s first uranium mine, located at Port Radium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and after transport by train from Fort McMurray and refinement in Ontario, were shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico where they were used to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945 that bomb killed 100,000 people instantly in the city of Hiroshima and left tens of thousands to die of radioactive poisoning in the months that followed. The uranium mines were worked by members of the Sahtu Dene First Nation, who hauled and ferried the ore in forty-five kilogram burlap sacks, exposed to the radioactive dust that coated their lungs, contaminated their water, and infiltrated their homes. Declassified documents have since shown that the U.S. and Canadian governments never informed the workers of the risks involved (Nikiforuk); Deline, the nearby Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake, would become known as “the village of widows.”2
We choose to begin our special issue on “Resource Aesthetics” with this amnesiac history because the prospect of Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site conjoins a host of concepts, issues, problems, and motifs that animate, variously, the essays to follow. The story turns on dynamics of visibility, of what can and cannot be seen. It highlights the inescapable entanglement of distinct energy sources and regimes under modernity—in this case, the overdetermined petro-system supplemented by nuclear-fuel residuals. It indicates the spatiotemporal complexities of extraction’s practices as of its legacies. It intimates a capacious repertoire of aesthetic figuration indispensable to the generation and deployment of energy as hegemonic resource. And it marks the inextricability of energy as power from social and political power, most significantly with respect to an ongoing capitalist history of settler-colonialism (crucial for us to acknowledge, writing as we do from Treaty 6 territory) in which resource extraction and the violent, even genocidal project of clearing away Indigenous peoples go hand in hand.3 For all these reasons, Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site demarcates a complex zone where “resource” and “aesthetics” come together as...

Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman discuss the politics and methods of the Energy Humanities wit... more Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman discuss the politics and methods of the Energy Humanities with Brent Ryan Bellamy, co-editor of this "Resource Aesthetics" special issue.

Postmodern Culture, 2017

The world itself writes oil, you and I write it." -Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil I sat down wit... more The world itself writes oil, you and I write it." -Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil I sat down with Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman to talk about "Resource Aesthetics," the topic of this special issue of Postmodern Culture, in Vancouver, B.C. during the 2015 Modern Language Association annual meeting. LeMenager and Szeman were both early proponents of critical work on oil and energy from within the humanities. Their work has helped to shape the ways scholars continue to think about the impasse between our rampant, energy-hungry economic system and the flourishing of human and more-than-human life on the Earth. I wanted to ask them how they each got started in this field and where they think a compelling place to start thinking about energy, culture, and politics would be now.

Pardoxa 26: Sf Now

This article intervenes in the newly resurgent nuclear debate, particularly in relation to carbon... more This article intervenes in the newly resurgent nuclear debate, particularly in relation to carbon neutral energy production. Combining the critical study of nuclear energy to science fiction narratives and documentary film, I argue that Michael Madsen’s film Into Eternity (2010) reframes debates about our energy commitments: what does it mean to rely on a single source for most of our energy needs? Others have treated Madsen’s film as an interrogation of the logic of containment and the tenuous character of the warning signs for waste storage. I engage these aspects of the film not as strictly limited to issues of nuclear waste, but also as symptoms of the vast energy impasse between the demand for the dense energy of fossil fuels and the disastrous ecological consequences of their continued use. The film addresses a contemporary audience as much as it addresses countless unknowable, and possibly alien, others; thus, by bringing this science fictional address to documentary, Into Eternity works through the deep impact of high energy use in late capital.

“Figuring Terminal Crisis” tracks a problem that emerges from Steven Amsterdam’s post-apocalyptic... more “Figuring Terminal Crisis” tracks a problem that emerges from Steven Amsterdam’s post-apocalyptic novel Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), though is certainly not limited to it. The formal limit to imagining a post-catastrophic future remains a historical one: how can a novel bent on representing an after, bent on imagining the movement of history as such, do so “in an age,” as Fredric Jameson puts it, “that has forgotten to think historically in the first place.” My claim is that Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010) struggles to represent the present historically and that in doing so it strikes at the very limits of post-apocalyptic narrative form. Despite its formal innovation it still suffers from a host of ideological setbacks precisely because it is post-apocalyptic fiction.

Canadian Review of American Studies, Jan 1, 2011

This article investigates the relationship between the concepts of freedom and confinement and th... more This article investigates the relationship between the concepts of freedom and confinement and the metaphor of ''the road'' in the works of three significant American cultural figures. A close analysis of the formal elements of the poetry of Walt Whitman, the novels of John Steinbeck, and the songs of Bruce Springsteen reveals a negation at the core of durability. These narratives pit characters, readers, and listeners against the ideology of freedom that structures road narratives and American durability. Whitman's version of the road is open and apparently available to all, whereas Steinbeck's version inverts these terms, making the road a place of oppression and confinement. Beginning to unveil these contradictions, Springsteen's music grasps the weight and emptiness of the road as a cultural signifier. Finally, the article argues that only through collective thought and action within and against the contradictions inherent in durability can we stop simply persisting and start living.

Editorial Work by Brent Ryan Bellamy

This short paper developed from an MLA roundtable on "Energy Humanities" organized by Brent Ryan ... more This short paper developed from an MLA roundtable on "Energy Humanities" organized by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti.

Special Issue of Postmodern Culture

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

See more info at www.ecotopianlexicon.com, and buy the book at https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/an-ecotopian-lexicon.

by Cymene Howe, Janet Stewart, Brent Ryan Bellamy, ian Clarke, Jeff Diamanti, Rachel Havrelock, Olivia Heaney, Bob Johnson, Negar Mottahedeh, Carolyn Veldstra, and Caleb Wellum

Materialism and the Critique of Energy , 2018

PDF available: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy Materialism and the Critique o... more PDF available: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy

West Virginia University Press, 2016

by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Darin Barney, Dr., Ruth Beer, Dominic Boyer, Olivia Heaney, Cymene Howe, David Kahane, Jerilyn Sambrooke, Aaron Veldstra, Carolyn Veldstra, Caleb Wellum, and Saulesh Yessenova

An Ecotopian Lexicon, 2019

Science Fiction Studies, 2018

Open Library of Humanities, Sep 13, 2019

Postmodern Culture, 2017

Pardoxa 26: Sf Now

Canadian Review of American Studies, Jan 1, 2011

Special Issue of Postmodern Culture

The special issue, “Energy Humanities,” gathers experimental and brief accounts of the cultural h... more The special issue, “Energy Humanities,” gathers experimental and brief accounts of the cultural history of energy in order to figure new research in the emerging fields of Environmental and Energy Humanities. From plastics to oil and literature, pedagogy to pipelines and activism, loving oil to understanding energy infrastructure, this collection offers a snapshot of the various ways one might approach questions of energy in the humanities.

Stages #0 , Dec 20, 2013

"Liverpool Biennial is delighted to launch Stages, a new online journal. It presents new writing ... more "Liverpool Biennial is delighted to launch Stages, a new online journal. It presents new writing and thinking, and is a space for staging research generated from the Biennial’s year-round programme.

The first issue is a portfolio of thinking that emerged from the Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) residency on the topic of 'Dock(ing); or, New Economies of Exchange'."

American Literary History

The Cambridge History of Science Fiction

After Oil explores the social, cultural and political changes needed to make possible a full-scal... more After Oil explores the social, cultural and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains why the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources is only the first step of energy transition. Energy plays a critical role in determining the shape, form and character of our daily existence, which is why a genuine shift in our energy usage demands a wholesale transformation of the petrocultures in which we live. After Oil provides readers with the resources to make this happen

The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, 2022

Totality Inside Out, 2022

The introduction situates the collection in the Marxian tradition, framing totality thinking as a... more The introduction situates the collection in the Marxian tradition, framing totality thinking as an aspiration that calls on theorists to understand the social whole as it is assembled by capitalism. This means doing away with the false division between socioeconomic critique and what is known as identity politics, instead understanding political economy and subject formation, economics and identity, accumulation and climate catastrophe as co-constituting phenomena. Grounded equally in the work of György Lukács and the members of the Combahee River Collective, the introduction argues that politics focused on point-of-production anticapitalism and those centered on races, genders, and sexualities that have long been excluded, exploited, and expropriated are not opposed. Rather, the former often lapse into identity politics while the latter strive toward totality. The wager of the introduction and, indeed, the collection as a whole is that we must understand both if we are serious about creating a world in which all can thrive.

Science Fiction Studies, 2020

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material inf... more Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.

English Studies in Canada, 2014

Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisele M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, eds. Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Cont... more Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisele M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, eds. Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2014. 480 pp. Frack, Gene-splice, Hinder, Immolate ... We all have dystopias to write. With an introduction and twenty-five separate essays, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase covers impressive ground. The book comes to terms with a genre that appears to be, if anything, broadly conceived: while the sheer length of the project suggests that it might have benefited from editorial discretion, the ethos of dystopia lends itself to varied applications and interpretations. Indeed, the rewards of engaging the text as a whole are great, especially as some of the strongest work is found in its latter half. The collection, when read in sequence, does not allow one to settle in to a particular geography, national-economic space, or version of dystopia; instead, the arrangement of the chapters jumps, for instance, from alter-...

This study examines the significance of the boom of U.S. post-apocalyptic novels after the Americ... more This study examines the significance of the boom of U.S. post-apocalyptic novels after the American Century. This dissertation argues that U.S. post-apocalyptic novels tend to be reactionary and political conservative, but that they can still be read critically for what I call their residues. I approach these novels as residual in three ways: first, in terms of residual social ontology within the postapocalyptic novel; second, in their residual generic form; and, third, in the residues of their historical present. Residues of Now describes and investigates the field of contestation generated by U.S. postapocalyptic novels in order to reveal the struggle between their reactionary and progressive logics. Chapter I compares contemporary post-apocalyptic novels to those from the height of the American Century, developing a tropology of the post-apocalyptic novel. The catalogue, the last man, and the enclave are tropes that feature prominently in exemplary texts by George Stewart, Richard Matheson, and Walter Miller Jr. from the post World War II period and which appear reconfigured in Stephen King's The Stand (1978) as well as in the post-apocalyptic novels today. Chapter II assesses the post-apocalyptic novel as a political sub-genre of science fiction by reading Brian Evenson's novel Immobility (2012) against Darko Suvin's definitive description of science fiction as the literature of cognitive estrangement and Fredric Jameson's elaboration of cognitive mapping. Evenson's novel describes the fearful immobile body transported through space always seeking a beginning in a way that captures not just the immobility of its protagonist, but the politics of immobility that lie at the heart of the post-apocalyptic novel itself. Chapter III investigates the spatial dynamics of David Brin's The Postman (1985) and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Wild Shore (1984). It introduces the frontier and accumulation by dispossession as central concerns in the mid-1980s through Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985). The Postman and The Wild Shore each still operate, in crucially different ways, on the frontier First, thank you to anyone I neglect to mention here. Above all, thanks go to Imre Szeman who continues to impress me with his commitment to my work and support of my development. He is endlessly generous to his colleagues and friends, and has not ceased to provide me with avenues for thought, research, presentation, and publication. It has been a joy to work with him, and I suspect that he has taught me things that I will not fully realize I have learned until much later in my career. My sincere thanks go to my official readers: Mark Simpson whose tantalizing, careful considerations set my mind buzzing with thought and Michael O'Driscoll who has an incredible talent for saying what I try to say in a much clearer punchier prose. Thank you to Natalie Loveless, my internalexternal examiner as the institutional jargon has it, for pressing me on my commitments. Thank you to Priscilla Wald, my external examiner, for introducing a new set of ideas that have already got me thinking about the next step. Thank you to the chair of my defence, Janice Williamson. A special thank you to those who came to the defence, your interest and support is both humbling and encouraging. I presented an early version of Chapter II at the Marxist Literary Group's Institute on Culture and Society at Ohio State in 2013, an early version of Chapter III at a joint session of ACCUTE and CAAS at Waterloo in 2011, and gave various other presentations at ACLA, CAAS, CACS, and MLG-ICS, all of which informed the development of the project. For me as for many before me, the MLG-ICS became a kind of alternate graduate school: Each year I would leave the institute energized by the conversations, each year I would return ready for the previous year's debate and find a new vital conversation underway, and each year I learned the challenges and rewards of trying to think those conversations together. Thank you to everyone who has participated over the years and to those who continue to make it engaging and instructive. ix I wish to thank the reference librarians at the Merrill Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy in Toronto, Ontario for guiding me through their wonderful archive. I was lucky to have received travel grants from the Graduate Students Association, a Marie Louise Imrie award from the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, and two Sarah Nettie Christie awards for travel from English and Films Studies. The Department of English and Film Studies also supported me by awarding me several Queen Elizabeth II awards and the Kule Institute for Advanced Study awarded me a Dissertation Completion Award. Thank you to

Open Library of Humanities, 2019

This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanitie... more This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.

Western American Literature, 2017

American Book Review, 2012

The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven developme... more The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven development from Earth to the solar system, making the human reality of life lived in space a central concern. The Expanse envisions a colonized solar system, replete with a United-Nations-controlled Terra and Luna, a military dictatorship on Mars, and a densely populated asteroid belt. This essay proposes that The Expanse offers an image of a worlds-system, by which we mean an interplanetary system of capital accumulation that reproduces the structure of twentieth-century geopoliticaleconomy at the level of the solar system. At one and the same time, The Expanse imagines a new cycle of accumulation founded in the planetary system and premised on ecological crisis on Earth and it provides a re-narration of the end of the cycle of accumulation that has been called the long twentieth century or the American century, which exasperated the climate crisis in the first instance. The Expanse is a pivota...

The Cormac McCarthy Journal

From bicycles to traveling drama troupes to harmless zombies, the post-apocalyptic narrative is f... more From bicycles to traveling drama troupes to harmless zombies, the post-apocalyptic narrative is full of more surprises than we would sometimes expect! Hardcover: A Literary Podcast explores the post-apocalyptic.

Patricia Rozema’s film is based on Jean Hegland’s 1998 novel of the same name. In it, Robert (Cal... more Patricia Rozema’s film is based on Jean Hegland’s 1998 novel of the same name. In it, Robert (Callum Keith Rennie) and his two daughters, Nell (Ellen Page) and Eva (Evan Rachel Wood), find themselves without power in a rural, western, North American mountain range. The film has an interesting way of doubling back on itself. After Nell carelessly leaves their vehicle’s door open overnight, draining the battery, Robert gerry-rigs a way to turn the engine over again using a chainsaw motor. Here, the solution to the problem of a dead battery lies in the combustion engine fueled by petrol and masculine innovation. The film captures the family trip to town as a series of encounters laced with tension–the gun toting shopkeeper who eyes Eva too closely, the bikers at the gas station who size up the family vehicle, the drunken bonfire party on the beach, and, finally, the late night encounter with a vehicle at the side of the road (two men, guns, and barely glimpsed activity in the backseat of the car) all leave the viewer wishing the trio had stayed home. The film cleverly reassures our troubled nerves with the light of day only to kill the father off through a sloppy mishap. The engine of Robert’s ruin happens to be the very one that charged the dead battery of the family car. A loose screw in his chainsaw causes the blade to buck out of a tree fatally injuring him and cutting his daughters free from his petro-patriarchal influence. Nell and Eva are now truly on their own.

Review of Leigh Claire La Berge's _Scandals and Abstraction_.

On The Visual Sociology and Methodologies Research Cluster of the Canadian Sociology Association ... more On The Visual Sociology and Methodologies Research Cluster of the Canadian Sociology Association

Gloria Nickerson and Kyler Zeleny, Organizers. “Visual Exhibition” of The Visual Sociology and Methodologies Research Cluster. The Canadian Sociology Association Annual Meeting at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities held at the University of Ottawa, June 2015.

Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts

Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, eds. Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Cont... more Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, eds. Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. Waterloo: WLUP, 2014. 480 pp.

American Book Review, Jan 1, 2012

Steven's Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming (2010) follows an unnamed protagonist through ni... more Steven's Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming (2010) follows an unnamed protagonist through nine vignettes, each with its own setting, plot, tone, and signs of the apocalypse. The novel begins on New Year's Eve 1999, with the narrator and his parents preparing to leave the city and (his father hopes) avoid the impending Y2K disaster. While it is never explicit what disaster takes place, as the book progresses, it becomes clear that some form

A Review of Evan Calder Williams' 2011 book _Combined and Uneven Apocalypse_

The most striking thing about looking at the bibliography of U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction seems ... more The most striking thing about looking at the bibliography of U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be also the most banal. What catches the eye is that the number of volumes released during what I'm calling the contemporary (2002 to 2013) phase of post-apocalyptic fiction is greater than those released from 1946-2001. I'd like to briefly suggest that this detail doesn't tell us as much about the changing nature of our fears or our dreams as one might expect from a spike in the production of stories about surviving the end of the world; instead, I think this intensification reveals something about how cultural production remains underpinned by the a logic of growth and can be explained, in part, through what Chris Anderson has dubbed the long tail. 2

The inherent question of this volume, the relation between time and globalization, finds form in ... more The inherent question of this volume, the relation between time and globalization, finds form in the oil pipeline. Snaking across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, miles of pipe take shape in order to convey fossil fuels from the source of extraction to refineries and distribution centers. Pipelines are part of a mechanism in fossil capital that generates an experience of the pure present. So long as oil keeps flowing, the length and duration of the journey does not matter – each instant when oil is fed into the mouth of the pipeline is completed in the barrel at the other end. Without an adequate replacement or an alternative way of organizing the social, fossil fuels continue to be the driver of contemporary life. Pipelines are the mechanism that keeps the motor running. But what kind of future does pipeline construction build?

Fueling Culture: Politics, History, Energy

Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

Atmos Magazine, 2021

Excerpt from An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) published in Atmos Magazi... more Excerpt from An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) published in Atmos Magazine. Contains a short introduction by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson Brent Ryan Bellamy and the chapter "Qi," by Yifei Li. Find the full excerpt at https://atmos.earth/rewriting-the-ecological-imagination-qi-deep-ecology/.

Classroom Ecologies | Correspondences: A forum for the environment, 2021

In Summer 2021, three researchers co-taught a remote course on "North American Petrocultures" at ... more In Summer 2021, three researchers co-taught a remote course on "North American Petrocultures" at TU Dresden (Technische Universität Dresden) in Germany. Brent Ryan Bellamy (Trent University, Ontario), Moritz Ingwersen (TU Dresden), and Rachel Webb Jekanowski (Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador) present an introduction to and discussion of their collaborative experience in teaching an environmental humanities course.

The twentieth century has been called the American century and the American century was built on ... more The twentieth century has been called the American century and the American century was built on oil. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, we are confronted with the ecological repercussions of a modernity that was based on carbon energy and it has become imperative to envision a future beyond oil and fossil fuels. With a focus on North American literature (U.S., Canada, and Indigenous Nations), this course will introduce students to the cultural traces of petromodernity. More often than not, oil hides in plain sight. From road movies to plastic bags, oil products are ubiquitous in North American consumer culture. Yet, oil usually only enters public consciousness when it stops flowing or when it spills. Oil may be understood as the life blood of capitalist industry, the lubricant of the American way of life, and the fuel of ongoing settler-colonial land policies in Canada and the United States. It has also produced some of the most iconic and painful images of ecological devastation, imperialism, and environmental injustice. Petrocultures produce their own aesthetics-from burning oil fields, to gleaming chrome fenders, landscapes of extraction, and Indigenous pipeline protests. Against the backdrop of the global climate emergency and the dire need to imagine alternative energy futures, this course enables students to reflect on the impact of oil on their own life and to develop an awareness of how to look for the "energy unconscious" in art, culture, and politics. With an emphasis on works of literary fiction, we will engage with a wide variety of cultural texts, from science fiction, to graphic narratives, nonfiction film, and photography. Key theoretical readings will come from the emerging fields of the Energy Humanities and highlight themes such as environmental justice, petromodernity, petro-horror, slow violence, the post-apocalypse, Indigenous activism, and ecotopia. This course will take place online. Attendance at synchronous weekly discussion sessions is optional but recommended. All mandatory credits can be fulfilled asynchronously. This is a reading-intensive seminar and students will be required to submit regular reading responses. This course will be co-facilitated with Dr. Rachel Webb Jekanowski and Dr. Brent Ryan Bellamy, two international experts in the field of petrocultures from Canada.